For most of Europe and the British Isles, the period between the sack of Rome by the Visigoth (410) and the crowning of Charlemagne (800) was the "Dark Ages". For Ireland, this was the era of Saint Patrick, which evolved seamlessly into Ireland's Golden Age.

Saint Patrick (c.389-461), the patron of Ireland, was a real person, a bishop and missionary. He came from England to Ireland to convert the inhabitants to Christianity -- at the time the only Christian religion was Catholicism -- and to educate them. He succeeded beyond any rational expectation, as Ireland eventually became almost exclusively Christian, as well as a center of scholarship and culture. Even when the Protestant Reformation swept through Europe and England in the 16th Century, Ireland remained staunchly Catholic, thereby triggering the Catholic versus Protestant conflict that plagues Northern Ireland today.

Patrick was born in Roman-occupied Britain. At the age of 16, he was captured by a party of Irish raiders -- perhaps in one of the many raids on England led by Niall of the Nine Hostages -- and was brought to Ireland as a slave. During his captivity he turned to religion. After 6 years of slave labor as a shepherd, Patrick escaped back to England, determined to convert the Irish to Christianity. This led him to Gaul, where he studied, was ordained (c.417) to the diaconate, and spent 15 years in the church of Auxerre. His first nomination as bishop to the Irish was rejected because of a sin in his youth. On the death of Palladius -- appointed first bishop of the Irish in 431 by Pope Celestine I -- Patrick was ordained a bishop (432) and began his mission in Ireland.

Patrick's success in converting the peasants was not surprising -- peasants everywhere were adopting Christianity -- but his task with the aristocracy was a daunting one, since much of their power, influence and status was associated with the prevalent religion, Druidism. The Ard-Ri (high king), for example, was also the high priest of the Druid religion. Even the Brehons, who formulated law, were threatened by Christianity, which had its own moral law that was interpreted by Christian priests.

Nevertheless, Patrick was able to make important converts among the royal families. By 490, 29 years after Patrick's death, the King at Cashel, who ruled Mogh's Half, was Christian. Eventually, virtually the entire island became Christian. Patrick conducted his mission from Armagh (which ironically is now part of Protestant Northern Ireland) and over a period of 30 years, converted much of the population to Christianity, developed a native clergy, appointed bishops, established dioceses, held church councils, and fostered the growth of monasticism. The Christian religion taught by Patrick was and remained entirely orthodox, except that the populace (and parish priests) from time to time favored the Brehon law's tolerance for easy divorce and remarriage, instead of Christianity's strict teaching.

In terms of church organization, Patrick installed the Roman model of centralized church government, involving territorial dioceses in which parish priests reported to a bishop who in turn reported to the Pope. As a minor adjunct to the diocesan churches, Patrick also established monasteries (with associated schools) that were not directly under the control of the bishop. But the Roman model of centralized administration never took secure root in the Irish church, which was simply another manifestation of the Irish people's historic resistance to any form of large and/or centralized government. Instead, in the centuries after Patrick, a distinctive Celtic type of church organization developed which paralleled secular society. Just as the autonomous tuath remained the basic unit of Gaelic secular society, the autonomous monastery, together with associated school, became the principal unit of Celtic Christianity.

Although Patrick personally was an indifferent scholar, he made enormous contributions to Irish scholarship. Prior to Patrick, the Irish elite were well educated, but their scholarship was entirely oral; indeed, Gaelic educators were hostile to the written word on the theory that it impaired memory and concentration. Patrick, through the monastery schools, introduced the written word -- albeit in Latin -- thereby permitting an island that had no written literature eventually to become the land of poets and scholars. By the death of St. Patrick (461), the Irish elite were a literate and learned people who doubtless recorded their history in writing, but much of this legacy -- indeed most of it -- was destroyed in the Viking raids of the 9th and 10th Centuries.

For more than a century after Patrick, the monastery schools and the secular Gaelic schools co-existed, but eventually, as Christianity overwhelmed Druidism, the monastery schools likewise prevailed. By the second half of the 6th Century, scholarship had become inextricably intertwined with religion, and schools of higher learning invariably were adjuncts of monasteries. The significant scholars all were monks, who revered knowledge and perceived Christian doctrine as the most important component of human knowledge. Not all art and literature involved religious themes, but much of it did. Thus in the monastery schools, religious art, such as the Ardagh Chalice and the Book of Kells and other illuminated manuscripts, flourished alongside secular, even pagan, artistic achievements, such as the Tara Brooch and the great Irish epic "Tain Bo Cuailgne" ("The Cattle Raid of Cooley").

During the 6th and 7th centuries, Irish monastery-schools were among the most prominent centers of scholarship in the western world. Students from all over Europe flocked to them, furnishing a dramatic contrast to the low level of scholarship in Europe during the Dark Ages. Irish monasteries also dispatched scholar-missionaries -- called "Exiles for Christ" -- to the rest of Europe. Saint Columba (521-97), a.k.a. Colmcille a.k.a. "Dove of the Church", the dominant scholar and poet of his era, founded a monastery on Iona, a small Gaelic-controlled island off Scotland, where he spent the last 40 years of his life educating the Scots and converting them to Christianity. And Saint Columbanus (543-615) founded dozens of monasteries (with adjunct schools) on the Continent, including his most celebrated institutions at Luxeuil in France and Bobbio in Italy. By the 9th Century, Irish scholars were among the most celebrated in the western world. The towering intellect among them was Johann Scotus "Eriugena", a native Irishman who traveled to France in 845 to become the preeminent scholar in the Renaissance of Charlemagne, and the chief professor at the Palace school of the Emperor Charles the Bald. Unfortunately, much of the tangible work product of the scholar-monks who remained in Ireland -- the writings and artwork -- was destroyed or carried back to Scandinavia by the Vikings, whose raids began in 795. Indeed, current knowledge of Ireland's Golden Age depends in significant part on the work of European scholars, such as the British historian Bede, plus gold and silver artwork now resting in Danish museums.

This period, the Dark Ages or Early Middle Ages (410-800), was the era of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the invasions of the barbarians, and the triumph of Christianity. The Western Empire was broken up into barbarian kingdoms, until on Christmas Day, 800, the Frankish king, Charlemagne, was crowned emperor of the West by the pope. His empire had a fundamental weakness, however, in that it depended on the personal rule of the emperor, who could not successfully delegate authority or levy direct taxes. By 900 the empire had broken up into a myriad of duchies, counties, bishoprics, abbacies, and other lordships whose rulers exercised more power than kings and emperors. At that same time the frontiers of Western Europe were being devastated from the north by Vikings, from the south by Muslims, and from the east by Magyars.